Wasting time on bullshit

This blog post will probably be a short one as I am committed to blogging on Mondays and Thursdays and my last Monday post got dragged along until last night because of traveling and it was a bit of a long one…

Lately I’ve been feeling very frustrated by social media and many of these online communities I’m a part of. Yesterday, for example, I was having a great day, went on an epic run, got some good food, starting working and was being super productive.

Then I finally finished my blog post from Monday and figured I’d share it out on Twitter and Hacker News. After sharing on Twitter I felt myself constantly checking it for comments which was annoying, but not that big of a deal.

Then it started doing well on Hacker News. I was like “OK great. It’s a nice blog post and I worked hard on it.”

So I checked back on Hacker News and it was gone. I was like “hmmm, wtf happened to it.” After some investigation I determined that it was removed. So I emailed the moderator just to see.

He told me that users flagged it. So then we had a back and forth and eventually got the post back up.

However, he was sort of condescending with his tone, saying something like “you shouldn’t write in that tone if you want to do well on Hacker News”.

“OK dude thanks for the tips!”

But whatever, that’s not the point of the story.

Long story short, I spent probably two hours doing nothing productive after I published the blog post.

And for the remainder of the day, I found myself constantly checking back on Twitter to see the likes, comments, etc on it. Stupid.

If I didn’t immediately post it to Twitter and the web, maybe I would have gotten actually important work done and not wasted all of that time. I should have scheduled it on Buffer to run when I was sleeping or something.

I wanted to blog more in 2019 for my own reasons, to become a better and faster writer.

I shouldn’t give a fuck what happens on Hacker News or Twitter, and I should stop caring about getting validation from those sources.

I think this is leading up to a bigger thing for me - leaving Twitter and Telegram groups for a month. And I’ve been thinking a lot about how these communities bring people down more than bring them up… but that’s another blog post for another day.

As I’m traveling alone now, I’m turning more to these online communities to get validation and I think it’s a bad thing.

When I had a full time job, I didn’t have time for that bullshit. I’m realizing that was a good thing…